How Chatbots Can Help You Achieve Your Customer Service Objectives

Whether your company is an international corporation or run by a single proprietor, customer service will be a critical component of your success and establishing worthwhile customer service objectives can serve as a roadmap for defining and elevating your overall customer experience.

Customer service starts with the first interaction your company has with a customer or prospect and continues through until there is resolution. When customer questions and challenges arise, adhering to your pre-defined customer service objectives can give you the best chance of retaining your customers and making them advocates for your brand.

How Defining Objectives Will Improve Your Customer Service Performance

The obvious reason for establishing customer service objectives is that it encourages the whole team to work toward the achievement of common goals. Once defined, the implementation and ongoing measurement of performance against these objectives become critical elements to ensure the team understands and is working toward the achievement of these objectives.

Some of the most common customer service objectives that companies identify include:

Solve Problems

Even the best products and services have problems that need to be addressed. Effective customer service seeks to resolve issues in the most expedient way to the benefit of both the customer and the company. To accomplish this, it is imperative that the representative listen to the customer to gain an understanding of the question or need and work toward a solution that will please the customer and minimize the need for a second contact.

Increase Sales

The customer service center can be one of the best areas for new lead generation. Through high-quality customer service interactions, agents are able to learn about customer needs and will often be presented with an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell the customer to different products. All customer service agents should be trained to listen for these opportunities.

Minimize Costs

One of the biggest challenges for customer service managers is in elevating the customer experience while keeping costs under control. To accomplish this, managers should be aware of new technologies that can streamline customer service operations. They should also implement ongoing training programs that will enable their representatives to work as efficiently as possible.

The Role of Chatbots in Meeting Customer Service Objectives

Chatbots are software programs developed to initiate and manage one-to-one online communications via a chat interface. While chatbots can serve a number of purposes for a business, customer service has surfaced as deriving the greatest potential value.

Some of the benefits of chatbots to customer service organizations can include:

Persistent Availability

Customers today expect to be able to have an actual interaction with their brand, even after hours. Chatbots allow for this with 24/7 availability to assist with customer service issues and provide the guidance customers need for quick resolution.

Immediate Access

Customers no longer have a great deal of patience for queues and wait times in interacting with their brands. Unlike human agents, chatbots are immediately accessible and can manage multiple one-to-one interactions simultaneously.

Decreased Costs

A well-designed chatbot will be able to handle the vast majority of frequently-asked-questions and requests from customers. This allows customer service organizations to minimize the number of representatives they need and to free up their agents to work on complex and strategic issues that can provide longer-term value to the company.

Click here to try a sample customer service chatbot and contact us to discuss the use of chatbots to meet your customer service objectives.